What She Left: Enhanced Edition (14 page)

I’ve been talking to one of the lecturers at Southampton about you, Alice.

I didn’t remember him from when we were students, his name’s Professor Cooke, but apparently he’s been there since about 1820 and reckons the two of you crossed paths briefly. He’s had this incredibly cool idea to make a kind of collage about you. Often it’s just me and him chatting but other times it’s actual real research, contacting people and verifying dates and precising stuff you wrote or said or did. Mum reckons it’s good that I’m channelling my grief positively, even though you’d say that was more of her yin and yang nonsense.

I felt a bit like a traitor at first because it’s so personal, but we have to speak up and drown out all the ill-informed, spiteful and stupid stuff that’s been said about you. ‘We’re the guardians of Alice’s memory now she can’t stick up for herself,’ he says and he’s not wrong. You always maintained you fancied being in a book, didn’t you, and that’s what this could be – the book of you.

He said I shouldn’t write too much about me or him on the blog, because it’s
you
this is about, not us, and for it to truly work we have to be observers, objective rather than subjective, but I always – I’ve visited him about ten times already – ask how can I be objective when you were my best friend?

I can’t believe I’m telling him half the stuff I am, TBH, but you can open up to a stranger in ways you can’t to someone you’re close to.

He reminds me of some character from a TV sitcom – the socially inept ‘uncle’ figure. His students probably hate him but he’s made for Radio 4. You’d love his office, Alice, every inch of every wall is covered with books, there are
thousands
. In fact, you’d absolutely adore Jeremy because he’s one of those ultra-clever people who’s been to some totally incredible places. Gawd, I sound like a schoolgirl with a crush, don’t I!

Jeremy – if you’re reading this, which you might well be because you congratulated me on my blog, welcome to a very exclusive club BTW … you’re one of only about six people who do. You can’t hold any of this against me because your ‘hypothesis’ is that the truth has to trump everything else. ☺

Listen to me, Alice Palace. Joking when you’re dead and it’s only been seven weeks. I asked Jeremy if that made me a bad person and he said if the worst thing I’d ever done was laugh at happy memories then I hadn’t done too terribly.

You’d like the way he always puts stuff in a historical context, Lissa. ‘How’s history going to change the fact that my best friend’s dead?’ I asked one time and had a real wobble, so he gave me a hug – he’s not a big man but he
seems
it, maybe that’s what presence is? – and said that I should be proud to have you as my bestie. I’d taught him that word, even made him say ‘chillax’. You’d have found it hilarious. He said he’d try it on his students or his consultant – and that’s right, isn’t it? I was, I am, your bestie and always will be.

He’s certainly interested in the threats you were receiving and says they’re one thing I definitely did do right putting on my blog; it’s inevitable there would have been those who were aggrieved and had grudges against you given the nature of your work. He says I ought to be careful talking to the media, though, because they’ve got their own agenda but I’m streetwise to their tricks and how
I
come across is irrelevant – all that’s important is that the facts are heard.

Mostly why I’m enjoying seeing him is because it’s another excuse to think about you. I do all the time, hon, but it’s like we have periods set aside – quality time Jeremy jokingly refers to it as – when we can concentrate exclusively on you. I do have a confession. Some of our get-togethers have basically turned into career counselling for me. You used to tell me I should jack in PR and go back into higher education, didn’t you, and these sessions – I stayed again last night until nearly midnight – are reminding me how fantastic learning is, even if a lot of what we’re doing isn’t so much learning, it’s
remembering.

I’m also conscious I shouldn’t write too much because everything on the Internet’s part of your CV now; it’s never completely gone even if you delete it, it’s still in people’s feeds and caches and Google can still sense it even though it’s not there, like how amputees can still feel their toes itching even after their leg has gone.

He asks me a lot about your funeral, Alice … sorry for ballsing my reading up … and when I gave your mum a cuddle she said, ‘Meg, how am I going to do this?’ and I said, ‘You will because you want it to be a celebration of her life,’ and she said, ‘Not today, I mean the rest of my life.’

Jeremy said he’d seen the hearse arriving: he didn’t go in but had been keen to quietly pay his respects, and I mentioned how you used to say going in a church brought you out in a rash and he said
he avoided them as a rule. Then he lost his train of thought and explained about these incredible sky burials in Tibet where they dismember the deceased – it’s done by someone known as a ‘rogyapa’ or body breaker – and put the remains out for the birds of prey. It’s called ‘jhator’, which means giving alms to the birds.

I didn’t say a word to Luke at your funeral because he headed off straight after and he was majorly out of order turning up reeking of booze … I don’t care if Luke is reading this, you wouldn’t want me to lie, and the truth, like Jeremy says, is what matters now. He says it doesn’t matter how I remember you, as long as I do. ‘Who’s going to remember me?’ he keeps saying, making me promise, absolutely promise, I won’t get to his age and have regrets. Then when I explain about how many of our friends have promised to live better, fuller,
bigger
lives because of what happened to you, he says, ‘That’s beautiful, that’s the spirit. You go out there and grab it, young lady, go and grab life.’

‘
Carpe diem
,’ I said once, using one of your favourite expressions, as if that would impress him, then shared more stories about us. Once I get started it positively pours out, and he can barely keep up, sitting scribbling away and the diddy red light on his Dictaphone flashing.

‘Daughters,’ he merely says. ‘Daughters!’

 

Comments left on the above blog post:

 

I do indeed read this, young lady. A sitcom character, eh? More Geoffrey Palmer than Victor Meldrew, I trust.

Jeremy ‘silver surfer’ Cooke

 

You can’t go round accusing people of stuff like that, Meg, you’re out of order. For your information I wasn’t drunk at the funeral. I’d had one pint. I’m like the rest of us, trying to hold it together.
Besides you seem to be conveniently forgetting it was Alice who split up with me, not the other way round, and I wasn’t seeing someone else!

Luke

 

No one’s interested in your stupid scrapbook shit and your dumb theories about a girl who drowned because she was PISSED out of her head. You need to be careful you and that old prick of a professor.

A FREEMAN

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Subject: Stay Away

 

How do I think things were in her final days and hours? Her state of mind, her whereabouts, her conversations, I go over it constantly in my head. My husband, he says I’m going in circles, but it’s not like I can be any
more
hurt. Why was she down by the water? Was she that drunk? Was she that miserable? Who was she with? That missing segment between her getting separated from her friends and ending up in the river, it’s torture to me. Then however frustrated and furious I get reading all the nonsense, the more I get exposed to it because all it does is drive me to seek out more information.

 

I used to believe in fate, but now I have faith in zip, other than the marginally consoling possibilities of facts. I hoard them, because I’m terrified I might forget her, Jem, might wake up one day and not be able to remember the detail of my daughter. Wake up one day and that she’ll be gone all over again.

 

So I’m asking you for something I never thought I would – help. Help me answer my questions, help me find Alice. You owe me that. Jem, what the
hell
were you doing
emailing me
? She saw your email in my inbox; she saw it on the day she died. That would have been enough to send anyone into a tailspin.

 

Sometimes I despise Dave because he
let
this happen, but it’s me who didn’t prevent it. What did I give her that helped? Proper lessons like the ones they dished out with sugary simplicity on those shows she devoured like
The O.C.
and
Dawson’s Creek
, advice to equip her emotionally to deal with the shit that’s thrown at you. I passed on nothing except perhaps a love of Sylvia Plath; can’t believe I introduced my daughter to her work when I understood only too well it could snag like a hook in your skin. A love of Plath and the hair I once pretentiously described in a poem as like a raven’s wing (I’d clearly read that somewhere), plus of course a desire to periodically tell the world to go fuck itself. Those things and our intonation, our cadence, even how we wrote, that was me in her and her in me.

 

Why didn’t I ever speak to her about it, Jem? It wasn’t as if I wasn’t aware this ran like a black streak through us Mullens women, the thing that visited her in the night and made her talk to foxes, the thing that I never had a name for but she called
IT
, the thing she put in big letters – IT – because small ones were insufficient. I used to reckon Plath was right, but she was so grotesquely wrong we should take her off the syllabus, not because we should control what people read like in
1984
, but because there’s nothing beautiful about death or convincing teenage girls there is.

 

Alice didn’t take her own life. She couldn’t, she wouldn’t.

 

I was in love with you. At least, a version of you – whether it was one that existed or one I’d constructed in my head is open to
debate. It would be disingenuous to claim there weren’t moments that in other circumstances could have morphed into fond memories, but they’re largely lost now, tangled in the woody knot of what came after we split up. It’s that which mostly remains: the anguished soul-searching of what came next (you have no idea, believe me). I recall one argument particularly vividly. ‘You mean Fliss,’ I’d shouted, because your inability to utter her name was driving me insane. ‘If you can sleep with me, you can at least say her name.’

 

‘Being married, it’s complicated. You wouldn’t understand.’

 

‘Don’t patronize me,’ I spat. ‘I’m not some love-struck teenager.’ But that was how I was behaving. I’d waited for an hour outside your office and, when you had shown up spouting some rubbish about a meeting having run late, I’d exploded. ‘I’m not going to become one of those women who’s permanently
grateful,
Jem. Grateful for a phone call, for an evening out, for a morning when I wake up and you’re actually still in the bed. I don’t have to do this. I’m young, I’m not unattractive.’

 

Your response? ‘How about we sort all this out over a drink?’

 

Along with dispensing compliments, that was your modus operandi: priming me with gin. Filling me so full of its warming magic that I forgot or didn’t care, didn’t kick up a fuss, didn’t scream, because we couldn’t have that, could we, a scene? Wring the last ounce of fun out of me, then scuttle back to your wife. I loathed you for making me the sort of person I hated (for your information, I’d never been with a married man before – or indeed since), but I loathed myself more for letting it happen. I started to cry. ‘This is a joke,’ I’d said.

 

You moved towards me, puce with anger. ‘If it’s all such a joke, why aren’t you laughing then?’

 

I was constantly scared back then, but right then I had a visceral, physical fear. I could smell your breath: stale coffee and onions.

 

‘Well,’ you said, squeezing my wrist. ‘Go on, laugh then.’

 

‘You’ve never made me laugh,’ I said. ‘You buy me meals, you take me to not especially good hotels, you buy me clothes I don’t need and jewellery that is the antithesis of my taste and then you go home to Fliss and probably fuck her too because you’re so insecure.’

 

You raised your hand – and admittedly I’d been drinking and my head was all over the place – but what I saw was a claw coming up at me, seriously it was like an animal’s claw. ‘It’s over,’ I screamed.

 

And here we are all these years on, back in touch. Can’t believe I’ve written so much. Cathartic, I suppose. You’re water under the bridge now, but you have a responsibility. You have power, divest it wisely. I’ve confided in you, Jem, so don’t let me down.

 

For your ‘records’, I’m attaching a few sections of her diary, plus one of my favourite photos. It’s her and Rob on a beach, abroad, so it must have been before Dave’s business hit the rocks. Look at her – staring out at the sea as if she could swim that blue with a few bold strokes, wade through it, walk on it. There’s not a cloud in the sky. It’s the sort of day you remember from childhood but never know whether it actually happened or if it’s a trick your memory plays on you: ice creams and sandcastles and dozing in cars and being carried up to bed. The sort of day everyone should be able to remember, but a lot of kids never have. We really tried to give our kids days when it was sea and sky.

 

You’re right, words so frequently do fall short. I’m sorry to hear you’re ill. I can’t say I’ll pray for you, but you have my best wishes.
When I visualize you it’s in an ivy-clad office, sipping Earl Grey and listening to cricket. Is that how it is?

 

You’re right – we are indeed a right pair with our secrets.

 

I
would
like to see you again.

 

Yours,

Liz